Larry Auster in reverse

Regarding Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s remarks about the Arizona anti-illegal immigration law (discussed by me here), the print version of yesterday’s New York Daily News was more upfront than the online version. On page two, at the top of the page, is this large headline:

It’s ‘National Suicide’

Mike’s grim view if immig reform mess isn’t fixed

There’s a slight sense of unreality about this. “National suicide” is the kind of alarmist language that is normally associated, at least in the liberal mind, with fascists, reactionaries, and cultural paranoids; it just oozes rightwingness. Twenty years ago, when I was preparing for publication my book, The Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism, and seeking feedback from friends and associates, several people told me the title was too grim, too extreme, it would turn people off. I took their criticisms to heart and over a period of months kept intermittently trying out other titles, but none of them worked, and I finally accepted that “The Path to National Suicide” was simply meant to be the title of this book.

But now New York City’s hyper liberal mayor, a guy so liberal that he said during his recent re-election bid that passing homosexual marriage was his highest priority, utters the phrase “national suicide,” and it gets right into a headline in the Daily News, except that he’s using it, not to warn against a mass influx of unassimilable immigrants, but to warn against stopping a mass influx of unassimilable, illegal immigrants. I haven’t seen any suggestions in the liberal media that the mayor’s language is too grim, too extreme.

We live in a world upside down.

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By the way, this is not the first time Bloomberg has used the phrase “national suicide” in relation to immigration policies. In early January Reuters reported:

“We’re committing what I call national suicide,” Bloomberg said on the NBC’s “Meet the Press” last Sunday. “Somehow or other, after 9/11 we went from reaching out and trying to get the best and the brightest to come here, to trying to keep them out.

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James P. writes:

Describing any efforts to control the borders as “national suicide” is another example of the Left’s perverse tendency to describe things as the exact opposite of what they really are. Describing the Israelis as “Nazis” and “terrorists” is another. Though the looking glass, indeed.

May 2

LA writes

I wrote: “We live in a world upside down.”

I just found out that Melanie Phillips has a book coming out called “The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power.” Here is an article in which she sums up its theme. She argues that true reason, science, and freedom are based in a religious view of the universe as expressed in Genesis, and that today’s scientism which dogmatically rejects God is irrational and totalitarian.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 30, 2010 02:17 PM | Send